


feathers

by xathira



Series: Beacember 2020 [3]
Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Beacember 2020, Body Horror, Other, Transformation, brief suicidal ideology, feathers - Freeform, more to jot down a concept than to... be any good, this was a stream of consciousness, werebird!Beatrice, what if the scissors didn't actually break the curse?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:01:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,697
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28104369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xathira/pseuds/xathira
Summary: The scissors didn't work... not the way Beatrice hoped they would.For Beacember 2020: "feathers"
Series: Beacember 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2043295
Comments: 1
Kudos: 15





	feathers

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by [Beast Besotted](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21518902) by faedemon. If you haven’t read this absolutely unique gem of a story, you’re doing yourself a grave disservice.

I. 

The scissors break Beatrice’s curse, but not the way they were supposed to. She knows something is wrong the instant that Wirt snips the primaries of her stiff left wing.

He hesitates as fragments of blue drift to the snow like pieces of sky. His grip on her extended limb is careful, almost shy, as if he’s already imagining holding Beatrice’s human hand. “Is something wrong? Did I—am I h-hurting you? I can stop, if it hurts too much—”

“No,” Beatrice assures him with bold, forced confidence. In reality, trimming one’s feathers feels no different than trimming fingernails… so long as the blade stays far away from the vein in the shaft. She thinks of her first day as a bluebird, when in mindless panic she’d tried to yank her feathers out by the roots; perhaps the curse’s desire to keep her alive and suffering is what prevented her from bleeding to death. “It’s fine, Wirt. Keep going. I think it’s working.”

(Is it working? Surely a curse on the verge of shattering would creak like an eggshell under the pressure of her defiance, running hairline fractures through her hollow bones as they prepared to break and reform.)

He frowns in concentration, thumb running gently over the bridge of her secondaries. “I d-don’t want to rush…”

But he _has_ to rush—Greg slumps on his older brother’s back as they speak, muttering half-conscious strings of nonsense into the nape of Wirt’s neck, and although Beatrice wants to have her true body back she feels acrid guilt that her uselessness means that the boys can’t return home right away. She’ll never forgive herself if Greg doesn’t make it simply because Wirt had to pause and help _her._

Frustration sharpens her brittle voice like the point of her beak. “Cut my whole wing off, if you have to! Just cut FASTER!”

Wirt nicks the last few feathers to the quick. Rubies immediately well to the surface, hot on his frost-chilled fingertips, and the anxious boy utters a strangled sound at Beatrice’s sharp gasp of pain. “I’m sorry—I didn’t meant to—you’re _bleeding_ and I—”

_“Next wing, Wirt!”_

It’s a furious tearful high-strained cry and Beatrice hates herself for sounding so fragile, so scared, for allowing a splinter of her doubt to needle its way into the open. _What if the scissors don’t work? What if I’m stuck as a stupid bird forever? What if Greg is freezing to death and none of this matters—_

(What if part of the curse was the hope she carried all this time?)

Wirt unfolds her right wing with a trembling hand. He rips the scissors through her flight feathers as if he’s tearing a bolt of fabric, leaving pale satin scraps on the ground, and Beatrice clenches every muscle in her tiny body and holds in the scream that wants to rip through her, too.

She doesn’t hear Wirt’s worried, strained words until her thready, tentative exhale has collapsed into a cracked sob. Her eyes are clenched shut to spare her the sight of blood dribbling from her ruined wings. What will she do, bleeding and flightless and alone in the woods? Predators will come for her… owls that she won’t be able to flee, slavering foxes that she can’t fly from, all because she’d been foolish enough to beg Wirt to mutilate her with a pair of dull, worthless embroidery blades… 

“Beatrice,” Wirt repeats, stronger now. His hand squeezes hers: an anchor and a lifeline all in one. His syllables quaver like his touch had, but this time with a warmer emotion. “Open your eyes, okay? It worked. You’re… you’re um… h-human again…”

His joy decrescendoes into a small murmur of bashfulness. Beatrice cracks open her eyes and notes that her fingers—her _fingers!_ Real, human fingers!—are interlaced with Wirt’s and gripping him so tightly that she has broken the flesh of his palm with her nails. He’s so alive… she can _feel_ him, skin against skin, and the sensation is so intimate and welcome that Beatrice chokes out an elated hiccup from the bottom of her deep human lungs. 

“I can’t believe it…”

(Why hadn’t she sensed anything erupt? Where was the explosive wrenching of her frame into its correct shape? Becoming a bluebird had been unimaginably excruciating—all her huge messy emotions and resentments condensed and carved to fit an avian silhouette—so why had the shift back into herself been so… seamless?)

She squeezes him once more for luck, earning a pitchy squeak from this awkward, petty, _darling_ boy—and when that’s not enough, Beatrice decides to test her newly human arms by pulling Wirt and a bleary Greg into a crushing hug. Wirt’s heartbeat pounds against her sternum and Beatrice could _sing_ at how percussive and vigorously her full-sized pulse thunders in her solid ribs. She flexes her muscles, stretches her tendons, pops her shoulder joints, and cracks her vertebrae back into place along a sturdy human spine… a spine which Wirt’s hands pat carefully, reverently, and Beatrice realizes that the reason his ears glow vermillion is because she won her body but not her _clothes._

At least he has the decency to avert his eyes when she rears away from him. “Here… t-take this… y-you, er, need it more than I do.” Off shimmies his silly blue cloak without somehow dislodging Greg. Beatrice doesn’t shrug it on right away; the snap of cold air on her bare collar bones invigorates her in a way she can’t explain. It _hurts._ An incredible, indescribable hurt that Beatrice wants to imprint into each and every frostbitten nerve. Wirt’s gaze slides toward her and jumps back away as if he’d brushed a hot stove. “Aren’t you freezing?”

“Yes,” she answers breathlessly. The slide of fabric over her shoulder blades makes her shiver harder than the snow she kneels on. _Freezing._ She’s freezing and she doesn’t have to drift into a muggy state of torpor or ball herself up on a branch, and neither does her family—

Greg!

Beatrice lurches to her feet—feet which slip on the icy ground but right themselves under limber legs—and helps a blushing Wirt upright as well. “Take your brother home,” she urges him. Modesty has no room amidst her panic, her take-charge bossiness. “Go on. _Go._ I’ll… find my own family. They’ll be too occupied with frostbite to be mad at me.”

“They’ll be happy to see you,” Wirt says earnestly, daring a demure smile. He adjusts Greg and starts off in a new direction with purposeful strides; however, he does pause once to look over his shoulder and throw Beatrice a final burst of encouragement. “Good luck, Beatrice! I… I hope you and your family are happy. And…” He swallows, clearly fighting tears. “Thanks for everything.”

Beatrice hugs his cloak around her, the fabric holding in his warmth. “You too, dork,” she beams back.

Wirt and Greg disappear into the evening gloom. Beatrice marches toward home—and, she hopes, forgiveness.

(She fools herself into believing that the flutter in her abdomen is dread, and not the frantic beating of wings trying to break out.) 

II.

The bluebird clan reunites with copious sobbing, scolding, and screams of happiness. They fly back to the mill—Beatrice stumbling in the snow behind them—and gather in the main room of the cottage they’d had to abandon when feathers took over their lives.

Her family’s plumage falls without much of a struggle. Her father builds a fire to start their blood coursing, and each of them sigh with relief to put on their own clothes again. “I’m glad to have all my chicks back in the nest,” Beatrice’s mother croons, kissing the crown of her eldest daughter’s head. 

Beatrice flushes and ducks away. “Mom… don’t call us ‘chicks.’ No bird jokes for a while, okay?”

“What are you chirping about?” her father grumbles teasingly—and Beatrice rolls her eyes, because she supposes she deserves this.

(For that first night in their house, nobody says anything about the pieces of curse that loiter like stains. None of them have ever endured a curse before, so who is to judge whether a stray feather here or there is unusual or not? Why should a fluff of down on someone’s nape be cause for dismay? Beatrice combs her fingers through her hair whenever no one is looking, and she _swears_ she can’t feel any errant plumes hidden in her tresses.)

“I’m sorry I ran away,” Beatrice repeats, over and over, a mantra that she hopes will act like a protective spell. “I learned my lesson, believe me…”

III.

The feathers don’t go away. They stick out from under her mother’s bonnet, and sometimes poke from her father’s mustache. Her siblings all have down on their temples or the back of their necks. After a week passes with no change, Beatrice is distraught.

“Should I cut them again?” she asks her mother, borderline hysterical. “M-Maybe those are the ones I missed when I was cutting your wings, and they showed up like this instead?”

“I think they’re rather fetching,” her mother titters. “Don’t worry so much, my dear.”

Beatrice can recognize false cheerfulness when she sees it. She takes to brushing her hair every night, one hundred strokes exactly, in case her left-behind feathers are hiding from her. 

What had gone wrong when she used the scissors on her family? Were the blades only meant for one individual? Had their magic diluted as she snipped through the primaries of her loved ones? That didn’t seem right… whoever heard of a curse being _half_ broken? What the hell kind of rules would those be?

Another week drains by. The half-cup moon fills to the brim…

Beatrice learns the true meaning of “pain.”

She wakes up one night sick to her stomach, blind with agony, sweating so profusely that her nightgown and her sheets are soaked. Her skin feels punctured all over by one thousand needles… one thousand _nails…_ one thousand railroad spikes, red-hot and rusted, all simultaneously pushing pushing pushing up from her live-coal marrow and through her fevered flesh. She is being split open, seam by delicate seam. Shredded. Pulverized. Her violently trembling fingers try to unstick her sopping gown from her chest to give herself a pathetic grain of relief—and those fingertips come away smeared in blood.

She rips the front of her nightgown in terror. Spreading over nearly every square inch of her body—throat, chest, stomach, limbs—are the thick spiky stubs of pinfeathers.

Her family startles from their slumber to the sound of Beatrice screeching. They find her writhing in bed, slathering blood across her blankets, skin hideously studded as if with thorns. Her eyes roll to the back of her skull; everything that flutters between her eyelids is an uninterrupted pool of black.

“Help,” she gasps past torrents of tears and bile. “Help, it hurts, it hurts it hurts it hurts—”

Anyone’s touch registers as stabbing, twisting knives. Eventually, Beatrice cries herself unconscious…

Yet she cannot escape her nightmare. The pinfeathers mature into a bluebird’s plumage overlaid on a human girl’s body—unnatural and wrong. The skin of her back crawls with the shuffle of wings that cannot form. Following an incident wherein she tries to slit her own wrists, Beatrice (monster, accursed wretch, miserable failure) is tied in bed like an animal too dangerous to set free. She doesn’t open her mouth during the four days after the full moon except to shrill so savagely her vocal cords rake themselves raw. 

“Kill me!” Beatrice demands of her father, her mother, whomever has to force food and water down her gullet to keep her alive. “I hate this, I _hate_ it…”

Her feathers drop by the half-moon’s rise. They leave behind pocked pits as reminders of where they’d been… and promises that they would return.

IV.

Beatrice understands that she is a slave to the moon. At its fullest, its gravity draws her feathers from where they’re buried, and she transforms into a creature robed in afternoon-blue and terracotta and grey. Feathers frame her face and grow in her hair; they collar her neck and plate her breast; they sleeve her arms and caress her legs. It is impossible to hide the feathers, unless she wants to walk under a sheet. And even if she _did_ manage to obscure her plumage, she cannot disguise the unnerving alien inkiness of her eyes.

She’s never considered herself a beauty, but during full moons Beatrice is convinced that her appearance could send strangers running.

“Cheer up, sweetheart,” her mother consoles. “It’s only once a month. You’ve more important cycles to track, and it could be worse…”

“How?” Beatrice snaps. (She doesn’t want to be nasty, but the tunneling infiltration of pinfeathers rings her limp with fatigue.) “At least when I was a bluebird I was _supposed_ to molt!”

What cruel irony: Beatrice had thought she’d cured herself, and she now misses her old curse. 

“We’ll think of a way to fix it,” her father says, coaxing her rage down to a tighter knot she can carry in her fists. “You found those scissors, didn’t you? Perhaps somewhere there’s an artefact that can help _this_ problem. Don’t lose hope, Busy Bea.”

As if _hope_ isn’t a finite resource that fades each night the moon’s pale face streams into Beatrice’s bedroom window. 

“Sure,” she tells her father instead. “I better start looking.”

So she does. Beatrice hunts for cures across the Unknown, fueled by the one thing she possesses endless supplies of: undiluted fury. 

She plants an enchanted rose on the east side of the mill so that its sapphire petals will drink the sunrise. Her feathers grow in bluer than they ever have—vibrant, brilliant, glimmering like crystal down arms that bleed when she rips the good-for-nothing bush out of the ground.

She ties a ribbon with her wish to a branch on an eternally blooming cherry tree whose limbs flutter with the desires of those who came before her. For a single full moon, Beatrice goes without plumage… but the next one finds her covered just as before, and her mother has to stop her from barging out of the cottage to chop the tree down.

She bathes in a purified river, and walks out with her feathers streaming water like chains of diamond. The people of that village will tell stories of a beautiful blue-feathered monster for generations. 

She kills a bluebird with her bare hands on the advice of a well-meaning witch, who sells her the bird at a stand in the woods that disappears when Beatrice tries to find it again. Under the glare of the moon, Beatrice twists its tiny neck. Its body is heartbreakingly small in her cupped palms; as she weeps for the waste, her tears run down soft grey-feathered cheeks. 

She brings home a whip braided with hemlock and hands it to her father, telling him that her plumes must be whipped off—for that’s what the old warlock in Lockannom told her. Her father throws the noxious thing in the fire and tells her that no one in their family will _ever_ raise a hand to her, not even to break a curse.

She buys a tonic from an apothecary in the seaside city of Chemantica, where people take one look at the scars studding her throat from all her broken blood feathers and quickly cross the street to avoid her. The concoction reeks of spearmint when she uncorks the bottle; it sears the wounds left behind by stripping feathers off her thighs, and when Beatrice vomits from sobbing so hard she vows that _no_ cure is worth such agony.

Nevertheless… Beatrice remains hopeful. Her faith starves inside of her, wilting, yet that fierce hunger is what exhorts her to travel to the _next_ town, to find the _next_ sorcerer, the _next_ crackpot cure, because each moment her teeth clap shut on disappointment she grows _hungrier._

She glares at the cobalt vanes layered upon the dorsal sides of her hands and forearms with her jaw taut. Her life can’t be this way forever. The scissors were supposed to work, they’d worked for her family (mostly, good enough, they _worked_ ). Perhaps… Beatrice had missed a critical piece. 

What?

V.

On a full moon tinged autumn-orange and slung sleepily on the horizon, Beatrice reunites with the bluebird that cursed her. 

Her back is against a fence post; she gazes out over a fertile field of pumpkins, their vines less tangled and gnarled than the dull rage festering in her stomach. Her feathers catch moonlight as if limned in fire. In her fist she grips a pearl that her brother brought back from a mountain monastery, supposedly kissed by a mermaid known for healing wounds; it’s done nothing to remove the feathers framing her face, but the busted cuts on her knuckles she’d earned from punching a stone wall as hard as she could have totally disappeared.

“You’re that girl, aren’t you?”

The curious voice startles Beatrice to all fours, whirling to face the fence; the feathers on the nape of her neck stand up like hackles. “Who—what the hell—?”

“Yeah, that’s you,” mutters the bluebird dryly. It perches on the same post she’d been leaning upon, just as smug as the day she tried to nail it out of the sky. “Looks like you broke that curse… almost.”

Beatrice snarls and lunges. The bluebird scarcely flits from her clawing hands and hovers in the red-violet night. “TAKE IT BACK!” the girl orders. Any angrier and she’d foam from the mouth. “I got the scissors to snip my wings. I cured my family. _Why_ am I still like this? What the _hell_ do I have to do to _not—look—like—this?!”_

She kicks the fence with each jackal screech. Her onyx eyes spark when she glowers at the creature that ruined her… until they’re abruptly flooded with scalding tears, which stoke her ire _hotter._

The bluebird angles toward a post several yards away and tilts its head at her critically. “You haven’t learned anything, I see. How disappointing.”

“Learn?!” Beatrice finds a stone the side of her fist and cocks her arm back to throw it. “Who gave you the right to teach me _anything?”_

Rock hits wood forcefully enough to chip it. The bluebird ruffles its feathers and regards her with reproach. “You really thought _scissors_ would fix you?” it inquires. “A common sewing tool?”

Beatrice doesn’t answer. She pants as though she’s run ten miles. 

“Have you tried _love,_ little nestling?” chirps the bluebird, a smirk slick in its tone. “Or even _forgiveness?_ Why don’t you tell me that you’re sorry, with your whole heart? Maybe you should get down on your knees and cry a little.”

“Sorry,” bites out Beatrice, because she can’t think of anything else. 

“I’m sure you are. Curses are ugly, ugly affairs… and yours is uglier than most.”

A slap in the face would have hurt less. Beatrice stands with her chin held high but wobbling, her eyes narrowed hatefully but overflowing, and if she could twist this bluebird’s neck like the other poor bird she’d kill she’d gladly do so. She’d twist the bastard’s head _clean off._ “Sorry,” she repeats, knowing that the bluebird knows she doesn’t mean it. She’ll never mean it. Her punishment didn’t fit her one reckless mistake. 

If bluebirds could shrug, this one pulls it off. “It’s really a shame, you know… that you haven’t figured it out. But it’s okay. Keep trying. You haven’t given _true love’s kiss_ a shot, have you?”

Beatrice’s lungs constrict. No. It’s mocking her. Even if that were to work… how would she find anyone who’d… who would fall in love with her like _this?_

She thinks of a red cone hat and kind brown eyes. Her vision hazes and she slants into the fence, lightheaded.

The bluebird chortles at her humorlessly. “Oh, my… you haven’t? And here I thought you were the sort of lass who’d stop at nothing!”

“Is that really it? A kiss from my true love?” Beatrice asks, pathetically hopeful. Best not to contemplate who that “true love” could be, if it isn’t the only boy she has in mind. Not a soul in the Unknown would be insane enough to fall in love with _her._

“It didn’t work for me,” the bluebird sighs. Ere Beatrice can ask what it means, the sadistic son-of-a-bitch pumps its wings and wheels over the trees, abandoning the girl to her schemes and the pumpkins. 

VI.

Wirt and Greg make it home. They spend a night in the hospital but are none the worse for wear—and they share a closeness that they never did previously. Wirt is grateful he had the opportunity to grow as a person, as a brother, and to come a little more into his own; Greg is happy that they have a pet bullfrog.

The brothers spend many, many nights in each other’s rooms, telling each other stories and regaling the fantastical events that healed their relationship by nearly killing them. As the months roll on, however, those stories are traded for more immediate events and concerns… mentions of bluebirds and Beasts and a perfect autumn wood drift backstage… present, but no longer the stars of either boy’s life.

That is why, when Wirt dreams of a redheaded girl visiting him on a clear moon-drenched night, his surprise renders him absolutely speechless. 

Beatrice is in his room. Beatrice is _here,_ in Wirt’s _room—_ and yet it is not quite his room, because the walls meld into close-trunked trees that replace the ceiling with their criss-crossed branches, allowing thin bars of moonlight to fall across his bed. Fallen leaves litter his carpet. His shallow exhales fog in front of his nose, mixing with the scent of pine needles and mud.

Beatrice reaches for him, just as shocked as he is. “Wirt…?”

Her arm crosses a curtain of pearly glow. Limpid cerulean feathers sheath her arm like a glove… Wirt’s eyes adjust and he sees that auburn feathers bloom across her clavicles, smoky feathers smooth her cheeks, her brow is a crown of sapphire vanes, and the eyes that glitter at him uncertainly are a bird’s bottomless black. Even the ginger curls that fall down her back are threaded with plumes of orange and cobalt. She is impossible. Impossibly beautiful. She terrifies him.

He knows that this is Beatrice, because she _sounds_ like Beatrice… but not even in his dreams could Wirt have imagined a creature as lovely, as _horrifying_ as the one he’s looking at.

“What happened to you?” the boy blurts, pulse knocking loud in his ears. “I… I trimmed your wings… you became _human._ I saw you! Oh, god—I messed it up, didn’t I? I shouldn’t have… I must’ve—”

She shushes him with a finger against his lips. Both of them startle, neither having expected a concrete sign that this meeting is _real._ “It wasn’t you,” Beatrice promises. Venom flashes in her onyx irises. “Turns out those scissors weren’t what I needed… who knew?”

“What about your family?” Wirt is afraid to touch her. He also wants to know the texture of the creamy feathers that glide down the column of her neck. “Are th-they… like you?”

“Nah. Trimming their wings worked for them. Mostly.” She shrugs and it takes a moment for the feathers on her shoulders to settle back in place. Wirt shudders to imagine what she means by that: _mostly._ “They’re alright—don’t worry. Y’know… a little birdie gave me a hint. Apparently, the scissors were never the answer. I was supposed to learn a lesson.”

Beatrice shifts her weight on the bed and Wirt’s blush crawls from cheeks to ears and down to his chest. Is it just him, or is the chirp of crickets much louder than before? “Wh-What lesson?”

Twin obsidians bore into him. “Do you love me, Wirt?”

“...Love?”

She draws closer, igniting her profile with moonlight. She is less _girl_ and more _bird of prey,_ frightfully poised and focused. “What happened with that Sara girl? Did you ask her out? Are you two together?”

“Beatrice, I—”

“I’m not asking you to marry me, Wirt. It’s a simple question. Do you love me, or not?”

“I don’t know—”

“We went through a lot together.” Her voice is hoarse with emotion. Longing. Hunger. Desperation. “There’s a bond there, right? Even if it isn’t romantic? Do you love me as a friend, at least? Do you ever think about me at all?!”

Wirt flinches at the piercing avian quality of her shout… yet his heart melts despite how he shivers in his blankets. He doesn’t pity Beatrice, with her flame-hair and mantle of blue; the swelling in his throat might be sadness, or regret, or an all-consuming compassion for the one who’d shared his and Greg’s journey in the magical place that still rules his dreams. “All the time,” he answers honestly. “If not for you, I… Greg and I would be…” His voice cracks. “I never thought I’d see you again, Beatrice. I wondered if you found your family and broke their curses, too. If you were happy. If you m-missed me, and Greg…”

“Then you _do_ love me,” Beatrice says with a growl of triumph. She lunges for him—swift as a falcon—and mashes her lips to his.

Wirt is filled with steam—heat and pressure exploding in his skull. He hasn’t even gathered the nerve to give Sara more than a chaste peck on the cheek, but Beatrice kisses him ruthlessly, as though he is a breath of air that she must claw into her drowning lungs. This is not a tender moment they share so much as it is an action Beatrice does _to_ him… as if Wirt a tool himself, not much different than a pair of scissors. He is a dumb object under her masterful influence. A meek worm preyed upon by the bird.

When she pushes away from him, eyes wet and boiling, her feathers bristle like quills. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “That’s all?” the wild young woman accuses quaveringly. “That was supposed to… I thought… I had to use up a wish to see you, okay? I’ll never be able to try this again and… I’ve tried _everything,_ Wirt. Nothing’s changed. Nothing will _ever_ change. I’ll always be…”

Numbness makes Wirt slow as a slug. He shakes his head dazedly and tries to grab Beatrice’s hand to comfort her. “I wish I knew how to help you,” he murmurs. 

Beatrice smiles bitterly. “No one can help me.”

She stands up to leave, and Wirt plummets through a swoop of vertigo that tilts the forest canopy upside down. The sensation of falling catches him—he hurtles into darkness—calls for Beatrice, trying not to lose track of dark eyes and bright feathers—

His back slams into his mattress, awareness crashing into his snapped-awake body. His room is back to normal: no branches or leaves or lonesome bluebird-girl. The lump in his throat expands.

“Beatrice…” he whimpers.

No one replies.

VI.

On a dreary evening where patches of Beatrice's plumage haven't shed their rigid bases, the accursed lass wakes up alone in a foggy moor. The flavor of copper and sour berries coats her tongue. She doesn't remember how she got here... there'd been a hamlet inhabited by others burdened by hexes and ghastly afflictions, none of them quite as extreme as hers, and... a wizard? A warlock? Somebody claiming magical gifts had been their mayor, and he'd promised that he knew the answer...

She props herself up to take inventory of her surroundings. The leader of that town had been no better than a snake-oil salesman, _that's_ it... and Beatrice had called him out on his lies by publicly tackling him in the street and trying to drown him in a puddle of rain runoff and horse piss. A smile stretches her bruised mouth and she winces with a moan. She'd broken a couple of the mayor's teeth... yelled for the village of beggars to listen to her... they hadn't taken it well. Not well at all. She'd fought them. Her fingernails are ragged from clawing clothes and faces. There's a nasty contusion on her forehead, large as a goose egg when she tentatively traces it with her fingertip. "Ow..."

A broken branch as tall as she is and thick as her wrist serves as her walking stick. Beatrice wobbles on her two legs—categorizing five more bruises, a handful of cuts on her knuckles, a spot of blood on her skirt where her skinned knee is oozing—and stalks onward, with no particular destination in mind. Three moons since Wirt wasn't able to banish her feathers, and the determined girl has given up on saving herself. Her new hobby is wandering the Unknown as a dangerous, mysterious cryptid: people who spread her story call her _The Bird Queen._ She enacts vengeance for victims of misfortune and malicious spells, since the tenacity of her own curse has rendered her immune to enchantment. Her feathers are her armor.

She'd wanted to _help_ that curse-infested community, damn it. That's the last time she'll ever try to rescue delusional ingrates...

A gentle drizzle soothes her wounds and the spiking ache of her pinfeathers. Ahead, a column of smoke weaves above a copse of trees like a scarf unwinding in the wind. _Shelter._ If Beatrice speaks sweetly, the occupants might consider her appearance good luck or a blessing from a martyr; if she flares her plumage and slices a glare at them, they might be too terrified to refuse her. Being the Bird Queen held its own rare advantages.

She finds a cottage overlooking a calm, shallow swamp, its water glossy as the surface of a mirror. Beatrice wets her bare feet padding up to the front door. Whoever's inside must be cooking; an aroma of roasted meat and herbs brushes away the mineral pall of the surrounding land, and Beatrice salivates with every longing inhale. Maybe she'll play the starved, stricken damsel this time. _Please, sir or ma'am—won't you spare food for a lost wandering wretch?_

The door opens after her second knock. A girl Beatrice's age blinks at her, surprised, but does not scream in horror or beg for her to leave.

"Interesting," the brunette mutters, appraising Beatrice from head to toe. "What manner of curse is this?"

She speaks so frankly that _Beatrice_ is the one who's taken aback. She quirks her head like the bluebird she resembles and scrambles to reconstruct her facade. "Well I... so, it started when... it wasn't my fault or anything—"

The other girl laughs as if Beatrice is trying to explain a mundane embarrassment like a rip in her petticoat or food on her face. The grin she shows Beatrice is a ray of sunshine, sweet as cream, and... understanding? Sympathetic? She looks as if she _knows_ exactly how Beatrice became the way she is, as if she herself had gone through a similar nightmare and shared a bleak sisterhood with the feathered stranger on her stoop. Suddenly, the dead hope in Beatrice's soul creaks and stirs.

"Let me guess: angry mob?" The dark-haired young lady indicates Beatrice's scrapes with a wryly raised brow and crosses her arms. _Girl talk._ Beatrice blushes. Is she honestly about to discuss whaling on a curse-cult the way her younger sisters chatted about boys? "Hopefully you gave as good as you got. I could tell my auntie about it, if you'd like? She has... connections. We can ensure nothing like this ever happens to you again."

"You can?" Beatrice squawks. Then she clenches her jaw, bluntly suspicious. "What's in it for you? You don't know who I am. What I'm capable of. I could be a monster that eats babies, for all you're aware."

" _Are_ you a cannibal?" questions the girl. That _can't_ be intrigue in her tone.

Beatrice's feathers tingle. _Who IS this chick?_ "No...?"

"Ah." Is that _disappointment?!_ The brown-eyed girl's smirk falls an increment, but then she backs away from the door and invites Beatrice inside with a welcoming sweep of her hand. "I suppose that's a blessing. Are you hungry? Dinner is almost ready—and it is _not_ human meat."

 _Why would she feel the need to mention that?!_ Beatrice grinds her teeth, considering...

"Sure." If the brunette flips the script and devours _her,_ Beatrice might even be thankful. At least she wouldn't have to dread the next full moon. What does she have to lose? She treads past the threshold without taking her attention off her oddly friendly hostess and does her best not to show how much she relishes the heat seeping from the fireplace and the warmth of the floorboards under her soles. It's a cozy little home... cute, even.

And it is definitely, _definitely_ haunted.

The brunette bustles into the adjoining kitchen, calling over her shoulder. "What's your name, pretty bird? You look far from your nest."

"Beatrice," Beatrice answers promptly—because only her curse has any power over her. "What's yours?"

"I'm Lorna!" It's a trilling announcement, sparkling with enthusiasm. The girl—Lorna—practically skips back into the main room with two dinner rolls, one of which she drops in Beatrice's stunned hands, as if those hands aren't filthy and marred with dirt-dipped feathers. Her camaraderie is as unsettling as it is contagious. "It's been _ages_ since I've had anyone for dinner—as a guest," she rushes to add. She keeps smiling at Beatrice with such palpable glee that Beatrice is dumbstruck; no one has showered her with anything but revulsion for a long, long while, and she has no clue how to react. "I've never had a friend... it's been me and Auntie Whispers for as long as I can remember. Would _you_ like to be friends, Beatrice?"

...Friends?

"Are you insane?" Beatrice asks point-blank.

Lorna tinkles a giggle at her. "I think we'll get along rather well, pretty bird."

(For a blink, a heartbeat, Beatrice's feathers don't feel so heavy.)

**Author's Note:**

> Beacember 2020, baby! Look it up on Tumblr.
> 
> This probably would have worked better for the "curse" prompt, but ooooooohhhhh wellllllll.


End file.
